Obituaries

[Eric the Green]

More musical deaths. Not sure why. Another great 60s artist has died at 81. Co-composer with Brian and Eddie Holland of the greatest Motown hits, Lamont Dozier.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lam...-rcna42156

Lamont Dozier, Motown songwriter behind 'Baby Love' and other hits, dies at 81

Lamont Dozier, the Motown songwriter behind hits such as the Supremes’ “Baby Love” and “You Keep Me Hanging On,” has died, his family said overnight.

As one-third of the iconic songwriting group Holland-Dozier-Holland, Dozier was behind a string of hits from major artists including the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers and Martha and the Vandellas.

Their catalog highlights include “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Baby, I Need Your Loving,” “Stop! In The Name of Love,” “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” and more, according to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, which credited the trio's work as forming a "major part of the Motown success."

Holland-Dozier-Holland was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1988 and later into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

According to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Dozier, who was born and raised in Detroit, grew up "surrounded by music as a child" and started writing lyrics and music before he was a teenager.

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_Dozier

Along with Brian Holland, Dozier served as the team's musical arranger and producer, while Eddie Holland concentrated mainly on lyrics and vocal production

[sbarrera]

Movie stars too, with actress Anne Heche dying in a terrible car crash. Honestly haven't seen many of the movies she's been in. She was also well known as the former partner of Ellen DeGeneres.

Anne Celeste Heche (May 25, 1969 – August 11, 2022) was an American actress who came to recognition portraying twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love on the soap opera Another World (1987–1991), winning her a Daytime Emmy Award and two Soap Opera Digest Awards. She achieved greater prominence in the late 1990s with roles in the crime drama film Donnie Brasco (1997), the disaster film Volcano (1997), the slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), the action comedy film Six Days, Seven Nights (1998), and the drama-thriller film Return to Paradise (1998).

Following her portrayal of Marion Crane in Gus Van Sant's horror remake film Psycho (1998), which earned her a Saturn Award nomination, Heche went on to have roles in many well-received independent films, such as the drama film Birth (2004), the sex comedy film Spread (2009), Cedar Rapids (2011), the drama film Rampart (2011), and the black comedy film Catfight (2016). She received acclaim for her role in the television film Gracie's Choice, which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination, and for her work on Broadway, particularly in a restaging of the play Twentieth Century, for which she received a Tony Award nomination.

In addition to her film roles, Heche starred in the comedy drama television series Men in Trees (2006–08), Hung (2009–11), Save Me (2013), Aftermath (2016), and the military drama television series The Brave (2017). She lent her voice to the animated television series The Legend of Korra (2014), where she voiced Suyin Beifong, and appeared as a contestant in the 29th season of Dancing with the Stars (2020).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Heche

https://www.theguardian.com/film/gallery...n-pictures

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-ar...preciation


Heche as Winifred Ames in 1997's Wag the Dog.

[sbarrera]

Wolfgang Petersen (14 March 1941 – 12 August 2022) was a German film director, producer and screenwriter. He was nominated for two Academy Awards for the World War II submarine warfare film Das Boot (1981). His other films include The NeverEnding Story (1984), Enemy Mine (1985), In the Line of Fire (1993), Outbreak (1995), Air Force One (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), Troy (2004), and Poseidon (2006).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Petersen

A Silent Generation icon whose films had a big impact on Gen Xers growing up. Of course NeverEnding Story is the classic kids movie from that era, but Das Boot was also a seminal film. I remember Enemy Mine, too; I thought it was brilliant when I saw it in theaters as a teenager.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/au...-force-one

Wolfgang Petersen, director of Das Boot and Air Force One, dies aged 81

German film-maker was known for action and suspense thrillers, including In the Line of Fire, Outbreak and The Perfect Storm


Wolfgang Petersen and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Outbreak.

The German film-maker Wolfgang Petersen has died at the age of 81.

The Oscar-nominated writer-director was known for films such as Das Boot, Air Force One and In the Line of Fire. He died of pancreatic cancer at home in the company of his wife, Maria Borgel Petersen. His death was confirmed by his representative.

After directing the thriller One of the Other of Us and queer drama Die Konsequenz, Petersen broke out with 1982’s Das Boot, a second world war drama about a German submarine. It was both a critical and commercial hit and was nominated for six Oscars, including best director and best adapted screenplay for Petersen.

“So many directors have their one film,” he said in a later interview. “It’s the one that changed everything for you and the one people will talk about forever. I am lucky enough that I have that film.”

It led to Petersen’s first English-language film, fantasy adventure The NeverEnding Story, which was an international hit and kicked off a string of Hollywood successes for Petersen.


Wolfgang Petersen and Clint Eastwood. Photograph: United Archives GmbH/Alamy

He teamed up with Clint Eastwood for the assassination thriller In the Line of Fire, which was nominated for three Oscars, before working with Dustin Hoffman in 1995’s disaster thriller Outbreak and Harrison Ford in 1997’s Air Force One.

The following years saw him direct the fact-based adventure The Perfect Storm, war epic Troy and disaster remake Poseidon. The latter was a critical and commercial misfire. “What I probably should not have done is the film Poseidon,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I was on a roll at that time … I shouldn’t have done it, because it just doesn’t work like that. At some point you fail.”

He then decided to take a 10-year hiatus before returning in 2016 with the German comedy Vier gegen die Bank.
Tribute was paid on Twitter by the Doctor Sleep and Midnight Mass director Mike Flanagan. “Very sad to hear Wolfgang Petersen passed away.” he tweeted. “I love DAS BOOT, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, THE PERFECT STORM, OUTBREAK... and I’ll always have a very special place in my heart for THE NEVERENDING STORY. Rest In Peace.”

[pbrower2a]

Das Boot gave the feel of a submarine. As part of the audience I felt that I was being tossed around on the submarine. That was of course his magnum opus. Even if they were on the wrong side of the war you wanted them to survive. People do not choose the national armies or navies for which they serve.

[pbrower2a]

I don't understand the mathematics, but this sounds important due to medical consequences. My father died of fine-vessel (capillary) failure, so capillaries are important. Capillaries deliver food and oxygen to cells and take away wastes; if they fail, then so do the cells and death ensues.

Robert Samuel Finn (August 8, 1922 – August 16, 2022) was an American mathematician.


Finn was born in Buffalo, New York on August 8, 1922. He received in 1951 his PhD from Syracuse University under Abe Gelbart with the thesis On some properties of the solution of a class of non-linear partial differential equations.[1] As a postdoc he was in 1953 at the Institute for Advanced Study and in 1953/54 at the Institute for Hydrodynamics at the University of Maryland. He became in 1954 an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and in 1956 an associate professor at California Institute of Technology. Since 1959 he has been a professor at Stanford University.[2]

At the beginning of his career Finn did research on minimal surfaces and quasiconformal mappings and later in his career on mathematical problems of hydrodynamics, such as mathematically rigorous treatments of capillary action. He was a visiting professor at the University of Bonn and several other universities. He was an exchange scientist in 1978 at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in 1987 at the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. In 1994 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leipzig. For the academic years 1958/59 and 1965/66 he held Guggenheim Fellowships.[3] From 1979, he has was an editor of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics.

Finn turned 100 on August 8, 2022. He died eight days later, in Palo Alto, California, on August 16, 2022.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fin...ematician)

[pbrower2a]

Tom Weiskopf, golfer:

Thomas Daniel Weiskopf (November 9, 1942 – August 20, 2022) was an American professional golfer who played on the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour. His most successful decade was the 1970s. He won 16 PGA Tour titles between 1968 and 1982, including the 1973 Open Championship. After winding down his career playing golf, Weiskopf became a noted golf course architect.

Weiskopf was born in Massillon, Ohio. He attended Benedictine High School in Cleveland, and Ohio State University where he played on the golf team. He turned professional in 1964.

Weiskopf's first win on the PGA Tour came at the Andy Williams-San Diego Open Invitational in 1968, and fifteen more followed by 1982. His career season was 1973, when he won seven tournaments around the world, including The Open Championship at Royal Troon,[1][2] and he would finish that year ranked second in the world according to Mark McCormack's world golf rankings. This was to remain his only major championship victory, but he was a four-time runner-up at The Masters and also had a T2 finish at the 1976 U.S. Open.[3]

Weiskopf won the Canadian Open in 1973 and 1975; the latter win was achieved in dramatic fashion, with a one-hole playoff win over archrival Jack Nicklaus, when Weiskopf nearly holed his approach on the 15th hole at the Royal Montreal Golf Club's Blue Course. Weiskopf was a member of the United States team in the 1973 and 1975 Ryder Cups. He qualified as well for the 1977 team, but decided to skip the competition in order to go big-game hunting.[1]


Weiskopf's swing was much admired in the golf world. He hit the ball high, generated enormous power, and had very good control as well which is a rare combination. Weiskopf's displays of his temper on the golf course earned him the nickname of "The Towering Inferno".

Weiskopf joined the Senior PGA Tour in 1993 and won several senior tournaments, including one senior major, the 1995 U.S. Senior Open.[1][4]

He also worked as a golf analyst for CBS Sports[1] covering the 1981 and 1985 to 1995 Masters. After 2008 he contributed to ABC Sports and ESPN's coverage of The Open Championship. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Weiskopf

[pbrower2a]

Darya Aleksandrovna Dugina (Russian: Дарья Александровна Дугина; 15 December 1992 – 20 August 2022), also known as Daria Platonova (Russian: Дарья Платонова), was a Russian journalist and political activist. She was the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right political philosopher and a supporter of president Vladimir Putin, whose political views she also shared.[1][2][3]

She died in a car explosion in August 2022, possibly in an assassination attempt directed towards her father.

After university, she worked as a journalist, writing for the state-controlled media outlet RT and the pro-Kremlin conservative channel Tsargrad, using the pen name Daria Platonova.[4][5][8] She was affiliated with the International Eurasian Movement, and worked for them as a political commentator.[9][10]

According to the United States Department of the Treasury, which added her on the U.S. sanctions list on 3 March 2022, she was the chief editor of a disinformation website called United World International which it itself states is owned by Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, who also controls the state-backed Wagner Group.[11][12][13][14] At the same time, she served as a press secretary of her father.[7]

Dugina was an outspoken supporter of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In particular, she claimed that the war crimes against Ukrainian civilians by the Russian army during the invasion were staged.[15][16] In June 2022, she visited occupied Donetsk and Mariupol.[8] On 4 July 2022, she was sanctioned by the British government, which accused her of being a "frequent and high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms".[17][18][8][19] She responded by saying that she is an ordinary journalist and should not have been sanctioned.[7]

Dugina died at the age of 29 on 20 August 2022, when her car exploded in the settlement of Bolshiye Vyazyomy outside Moscow.[20][1] She was driving to Moscow after attending the annual festival "Tradition", which describes itself as a family festival for art lovers.[1] The "Tradition" festival is held at the Zakharovo estate,[1] approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) north of the site of the explosion. Investigators said an explosive device was planted in the car.[21] It is unclear whether she was targeted directly, or whether her father, who had been expected to travel with her but switched to another car at the last minute, was the intended target.[1]

The head of the Donetsk People's Republic, Denis Pushilin, claimed that Ukrainian authorities were behind the explosion.[22] The Ukrainian government denied any involvement, saying that "We are not a criminal state like the Russian Federation, much less a terrorist one."[1][23][24]
Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of Russia's Duma now living in exile in Ukraine, claimed that a Russian partisan group going by the name National Republican Army (NRA) was responsible for the attack. Ponomarev says the NRA is an underground group working inside Russia dedicated to overthrowing the Putin regime.[25]
The Russian Federal Security Service claimed that Ukrainian special services were behind the killing, stating that they hired a contractor, a Ukrainian national named Natalia Vovk, who escaped to Estonia after the explosion.[26][27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darya_Dugina

[pbrower2a]

Leonard Ray Dawson (June 20, 1935 – August 24, 2022) was an American football quarterback who played in the National Football League (NFL) and American Football League (AFL) for 19 seasons, primarily with the Kansas City Chiefs franchise. Dawson began his professional career in 1957 with the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL and also played for the Cleveland Browns. He left the NFL in 1962 to sign with the AFL's Chiefs (then known as the Dallas Texans), where he spent the last 14 seasons of his career, and rejoined the NFL after the AFL–NFL merger.
Dawson led the Texans/Chiefs to three American Football League Championships (1962, 1966, 1969), and the franchise's first Super Bowl title in Super Bowl IV, for which he won the game's MVP award. Dawson retired from professional football after the 1975 season[1] and later served as the sports director at KMBC-TV in Kansas City and color analyst for the Chiefs Radio Network.

Dawson owned the Chiefs' single-season passing touchdown record, which he set in 1964 with 30 touchdowns in only 14 games, a record that stood until 2018, when Patrick Mahomes broke it in 10 games. He still owns the Chiefs career passing yards, touchdowns, and wins records despite last playing in 1975, the NFL expanding to 16 game seasons, and the evolution into the NFL being a pass-dominated league. He was inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1987.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Dawson

[pbrower2a]

Robert Emmet Finnigan (May 27, 1927 – August 14, 2022) was an American pioneer in the development of gas chromatography–mass spectrometry equipment (GC/MS). Finnigan founded the Scientific Instruments Division of Electronic Associates, Inc., producing the first commercial quadrupole mass spectrometer in 1964. He then formed Finnigan Instruments Corporation to combine a computer system with a quadrupole mass spectrometer and gas chromatograph. Finnigan's GC/MS/computer systems are used to detect and identify trace organic compounds, making them important instruments for the monitoring and protection of the environment. They were adopted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as a standard instrument for monitoring water quality and were fundamental to the work of the EPA.[1][2]

More at Wikipedia.

[pbrower2a]

I do not understand the topic, but it sounds important. Particle physics is as basic science as can exist. 



Slavnov was born in Moscow on 22 December 1939. He graduated in physics in 1962 from Moscow State University and received in 1965 his Russian candidate degree (Ph.D.) from the Steklov Institute. He then worked at the Steklov Institute in the department of theoretical physics, most recently as a principal researcher. In 1972 he received his Russian doctorate (higher doctorate), becoming a professor in 1981. In 1992 he became the head of the department of quantum field theory and later became the head of the department of theoretical physics at the Steklov Institute. From 1991, he was also the chair of the department of theoretical physics at Moscow State University.


Slavnov's research dealt with quantum field theory (including renormalization and non-perturbative methods), supersymmetry, gauge theory,[1] and lattice gauge theory.
Slavnov-Taylor identities, named after him and John C. Taylor, are non-abelian generalizations of Ward-Takahashi identities.[2][3][4]

Slavnov received in 2013 the Pomeranchuk Prize, in 1999 the Humboldt Research Award, in 2007 the Fock Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in 1995 the Russian State Prize. In 1974 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Vancouver.[5] He became in 1987 a corresponding member and in 2000 a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Slavnov was also an editor for the journal Theoretical and Mathematical Physics.
Slavnov died on 25 August 2022, at the age of 82.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Slavnov

[pbrower2a]

last living credited adult cast member of It's a Wonderful Life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Patton

Virginia Ann Marie Patton Moss (June 25, 1925 – August 18, 2022) was an American actress. After appearing in several films in the early 1940s, she was cast in her most well-known role as Ruth Dakin Bailey in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). In 1949, Patton retired from acting, with her final film credit being The Lucky Stiff (1949).


Patton was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 25, 1925, to Marie (née Cain) and Donald Patton.[1][2] She was raised in her father's hometown of Portland, Oregon,[3] where her family relocated when she was an infant.[4] She is a niece of General George S. Patton.[5] Patton graduated from Jefferson High School in Portland, and then relocated to Los Angeles, California, where she attended the University of Southern California (USC).[6]


While a student at USC, Patton began to audition for acting parts. She collaborated in plays with screenwriter William C. DeMille while in college.[6] She had several insignificant film appearances before being cast in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) as Ruth Dakin Bailey, the wife of George Bailey's younger brother Harry.

Although Capra did not know Patton personally, she read the role for him and he signed her to a contract. Patton later said that she was the only girl the famous director ever signed in his entire career. Patton still gave interviews about It's a Wonderful Life and was the last surviving credited member of the adult actors in the film (a number of child actors are still alive).

Patton made only four films after It's a Wonderful Life, including her first lead in the B-Western Black Eagle (1948).[7] She appeared in the drama The Burning Cross (1946), a film about a World War II veteran who becomes embroiled with the Ku Klux Klan upon returning to his hometown.[8]

Patton was married to Cruse W. Moss from 1949 until his death in 2018. She gave up acting in the late 1940s to concentrate on raising a family with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan.[7] She later attended the University of Michigan.[7]

Patton died on August 18, 2022, at the age of 97.[9] She was the last surviving adult cast member of It's a Wonderful Life.[10]

[pbrower2a]

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempt to modernize communist control of the Soviet Union unleashed forces that brought down the superpower, has died, Russian news agencies reported Tuesday.
The Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow said Gorbachev died after "a long and grave illness.'' He was 91.
Leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991, Gorbachev tried to revive the moribund communist state by introducing polices of economic and political openness, known as perestroika and glasnost.
But the reforms quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian control and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation, bringing the Cold War to a conclusion.

When Gorbachev turned 90 last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin -- a critic of Gorbachev's policies -- hailed him in a letter published by the Kremlin as “one of the most outstanding statesmen of modern times who made a considerable impact on the history of our nation and the world.” 


Even though Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War, he was despised by many at home as Russians blamed him for the collapse of the once-fearsome Soviet Union. When he ran for president in 1996, Gorbachev received less than 1% of the vote.
In a 1992 interview with The Associated Press, Gorbachev said he would do it all over again.

“I see myself as a man who started the reforms that were necessary for the country and for Europe and the world,” he said.

Gorbachev presented a more modern, friendlier face to the rest of the world than that of his predecessors atop the Soviet regime, even if he didn't intend to dismantle it.

Ultimately, he was pushed by democratic activists led by Moscow's mayor, Boris Yeltsin, to abolish the Communist Party, eliminating a totalitarian regime that had taken over Eastern Europe and spread communism worldwide.

"Mikhail Gorbachev was arguably the most important world leader since World War II,'' said Paul D'Anieri, a professor of political science at the University of California at Riverside and the author of the 2019 book “Ukraine and Russia."
"The clarity with which he saw the flaws in Soviet communism and the bravery with which he tackled them are not diminished by the fact that his reforms ultimately failed in Russia. Gorbachev almost single-handedly ended the Cold War and in the process brought freedom to over a dozen countries and hundreds of millions of people."
Gorbachev served as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in effect its leader, and in 1990 he became the Soviet Union's first and only president.

Under his rule, the Soviets began withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in 1988, ending a disastrous 10-year military campaign that saw 15,000 Soviet soldiers and about 1 million Afghan civilians killed.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his efforts at arms control in which he and President Ronald Reagan agreed to the first reductions in nuclear stockpiles between the two nations.

A year later, Gorbachev was out of power as the Soviet Union was disbanded and its Eastern European bloc freed, followed by the first free elections in more than 70 years won by his arch-enemy, Yeltsin. Gorbachev's resignation signaled the end of the Cold War period that followed World War II, which was marked by rising tensions between the United States and its allies against the Soviets and their puppet states.

Gorbachev hoped to revive Soviet fortunes, devastated by central planning of the economy and hampered by attempts to keep pace with a military buildup under Reagan, whose pursuit of a space-based anti-nuclear missile system agitated the Soviets. The two leaders agreed to stop making nuclear weapons and eliminate some.
Gorbachev's changes were criticized at home as either too much too fast or not enough, as common goods grew scarce on store shelves, civic unrest grew, particularly among the Baltic and Caucasus states, and national economic problems deepened.

As Moscow weakened, Eastern bloc countries abandoned communism, and some republics long dominated by the Soviets demanded independence. In August 1991, hard-liners in the government launched an abortive coup d'etat. They ordered the Soviet Army to put down demonstrations in Moscow, but the soldiers refused at the urging of Yeltsin.

After the failed takeover, Gorbachev attempted to change the party further, but his power had been overwhelmed by the democratic forces. He resigned from the presidency on Dec. 25, 1991, a day before the Soviet Union dissolved.
Gorbachev's rise to power, after Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982 and the two leaders who briefly followed Brezhnev, roughly coincided with that of Reagan, who was first elected in 1980 with a political appeal based in part on hardline anti-communism. The two met in five summits, the first in Geneva in 1985, where they sat around a fire with only interpreters present in an effort to find common ground and build a relationship, both between themselves and between their countries.

In 1987, they signed a treaty eliminating all nuclear-armed ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 310 to 3,100 miles – the first agreement to reduce nuclear weapons.

Reagan famously invoked Gorbachev's name in his speech in 1987 at the Berlin Wall, when he demanded that the Soviet leader tear down the wall that divided the city between east and west and became emblematic of the Cold War.
"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' Reagan said.

Two years later, in 1989, the wall was opened to permit travel between the two Berlins, and it was gone a year later.
Gorbachev was born Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev on March 2, 1931, to a Russian-Ukrainian peasant family in the village of Privolnoye, Krasnogvardeisky district, Stavropol territory, an agricultural region in the south of the Russian republic.

After leaving power, Gorbachev focused on his Gorbachev Foundation, focusing on change in Russia. In 1999, his wife, Raisa, whom he married in 1953, died after battling leukemia.

From USA Today.

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Barbara Ehrenreich (/ˈɛərənraɪk/, AIR-ən-rike;[1] née Alexander; August 26, 1941 – September 1, 2022) was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America; a memoir of Ehrenreich's three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.


Ehrenreich was born to Isabelle (née Oxley) and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town".[2] In an interview on C-SPAN, she characterized her parents as "strong union people" with two family rules: "never cross a picket line and never vote Republican".[3] In a talk she gave in 1999, Ehrenreich called herself a "fourth-generation atheist".[4]

"As a little girl", she told The New York Times in 1993, "I would go to school and have to decide if my parents were the evil people they were talking about, part of the Red Menace we read about in the Weekly Reader, just because my mother was a liberal Democrat who would always talk about racial injustice."[5] Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana School of Mines (renamed Montana Technological University since 2018[6]), and then to Carnegie Mellon University. After her father graduated from the Montana School of Mines, the family moved to Pittsburgh, New York, and Massachusetts, before settling down in Los Angeles.[7] He eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation. Her parents later divorced.[citation needed]



Ehrenreich originally studied physics at Reed College, later changing to chemistry and graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was entitled Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode. In 1968, she started a Ph.D program for theoretical physics, but changed early on to cellular immunology and received her Ph.D at Rockefeller University.[7][8]



In 1970, Ehrenreich gave birth to her daughter Rosa in a public clinic in New York. "I was the only white patient at the clinic, and I found out this was the health care women got," she told The Globe and Mail newspaper in 1987, "They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home. I was enraged. The experience made me a feminist."[9]



After completing her doctorate, Ehrenreich did not pursue a career in science. Instead, she worked first as an analyst with the Bureau of the Budget in New York City and with the Health Policy Advisory Center, and later as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.

In 1972, Ehrenreich began co-teaching a course on women and health with feminist journalist and academic Deirdre English. Through the rest of the seventies, Ehrenreich worked mostly in health-related research, advocacy and activism, including co-writing, with English, several feminist books and pamphlets on the history and politics of women's health. During this period she began speaking frequently at conferences staged by women's health centers and women's groups, by universities, and by the United States government. She also spoke regularly about socialist feminism and about feminism in general.[10]

Throughout her career, Ehrenreich has worked as a freelance writer, and she is arguably best known for her non-fiction reportage, book reviews and social commentary. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times Book Review supplement, Vogue, Salon.com, TV Guide, Mirabella and American Film. Her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Life, Mother Jones, Ms., The Nation, The New Republic, the New Statesman, In These Times, The Progressive, Working Woman, and Z Magazine.[10]



Ehrenreich has served as founder, advisor or board member to a number of organizations including the National Women's Health Network, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the National Mental Health Consumers' Self-Help Clearinghouse, the Nationwide Women's Program of the American Friends Service Committee, the Brooklyn-based Association for Union Democracy, the Boehm Foundation, the Women's Committee of 100, the National Writers Union, the Progressive Media Project, FAIR's advisory committee on women in the media, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and the Campaign for America's Future.[10]



Between 1979 and 1981, she served as an adjunct associate professor at New York University and as a visiting professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia and at Sangamon State University. She lectured at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was a writer-in-residence at the Ohio State University, Wayne Morse chair at the University of Oregon, and a teaching fellow at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the New York-based Society of American Historians.[10]



In 2000, Ehrenreich endorsed the presidential campaign of Ralph Nader; in 2004, she urged voters to support John Kerry in the swing states.[11]

In February 2008, she expressed support for then-Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.[12]



In 2001, Ehrenreich published her seminal work, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Seeking to explore whether people can subsist on minimum wage in the United States, she worked "undercover" in a series of minimum-wage jobs, such as waitress, housekeeper, and Wal-Mart associate, and reported on her efforts to pay living expenses with the low wages paid by those jobs (an average of $7 per hour). She concluded that it was impossible to pay for food and rent without working at least two such jobs. Nickel and Dimed became a bestseller and a classic of social justice literature.[13]



Filling in for a vacationing Thomas Friedman as a columnist with The New York Times in 2004, Ehrenreich wrote about how, in the fight for women's reproductive rights, "it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me" and said that she herself "had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years".[14]



In her 1990 book of essays, The Worst Years of Our Lives, she wrote that "the one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks."[15]

In 2005, The New Yorker called her "a veteran muckraker".[16]



In 2006, she founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status. We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers—people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control."[17]

In 2009, she wrote Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, which investigated the rise of the positive thinking industry in the USA. She included her own experience after being told that she had breast cancer, as a starting point in this book.[18] In this book, she brought to light various methods of what Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann calls "quantum flapdoodle".[19]



Beginning in 2013, Ehrenreich was an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also served on the NORML board of directors, the Institute for Policy Studies board of trustees and the editorial board of The Nation. She has served on the editorial boards of Social Policy, Ms., Mother Jones, Seven Days, Lear's, The New Press, and Culturefront, and as a contributing editor to Harper's.[10]




More at Wikipedia.

[pbrower2a]

Frank Donald Drake (May 28, 1930 – September 2, 2022) was an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He was involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the founding of SETI,[2][3][4][5] mounting the first observational attempts at detecting extraterrestrial communications in 1960 in Project Ozma, developing the Drake equation, and as the creator of the Arecibo Message, a digital encoding of an astronomical and biological description of the Earth and its lifeforms for transmission into the cosmos.

Born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois,[6] as a youth Drake loved electronics and chemistry. He reports that he considered the possibility of life existing on other planets as an eight-year-old, but never discussed the idea with his family or teachers due to the prevalent religious ideology.

He enrolled at Cornell University on a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. Once there he began studying astronomy. His ideas about the possibility of extraterrestrial life were reinforced by a lecture from astrophysicist Otto Struve in 1951. After college, he served briefly as an electronics officer on the heavy cruiser USS Albany. He then went on to graduate school at Harvard to study radio astronomy.

Drake's hobbies included lapidary and the cultivation of orchids.[7]



Although explicitly linked with modern views on the likelihood and detectability of extraterrestrial civilizations, Drake started his career undertaking radio astronomical research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, and later at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He conducted key measurements that revealed the presence of a Jovian ionosphere and magnetosphere.



In the 1960s, Drake spearheaded the conversion of the Arecibo Observatory to a radio astronomical facility, later updated in 1974 and 1996. As a researcher, Drake was involved in the early work on pulsars. In this period, Drake was a professor at Cornell University and director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) – the formal name for the Arecibo facility. In 1974 he wrote the Arecibo message.[8]

He is one of the pioneers of the modern field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with Giuseppe Cocconi, Philip Morrison, Iosif Shklovsky, and Carl Sagan.



Drake co-designed the Pioneer plaque with Carl Sagan in 1972. It became the first physical message sent into space. The plaque was designed to be understandable by extraterrestrials should they encounter it. He later supervised the creation of the Voyager Golden Record. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.



Drake was a member of the National Academy of Sciences where he chaired the board of physics and astronomy of the National Research Council (1989–1992). He also served as president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University (1964–1984) and served as the director of the Arecibo Observatory. As of 2010, he was involved in "The Carl Sagan Center for the Study of life in the Universe" at the SETI Institute.[9]



He was emeritus professor of astronomy and astrophysics[10] at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he also served as dean of Natural Sciences (1984–1988). He served on the board of trustees of the SETI Institute.[11]



Drake died on September 2, 2022, at his home in Aptos, California, from natural causes at the age of 92.[12]



Drake Planetarium at Norwood High School in Norwood, Ohio, is named for Drake and linked to NASA.
Asteroid 4772 Frankdrake is named after him.

from Wikipedia.

[pbrower2a]

Olympic gold, boxing:


Boris Nikolayevich Lagutin (Russian: Борис Николаевич Лагутин) (24 June 1938 – 4 September 2022) was a Soviet light middleweight boxer. During his career as a boxer, he won 241 fights and lost only 11. He won medals in three Olympic Games, including two golds, in 1964 and 1968. Lagutin also won at European championships in 1961 and 1963 and at USSR championships in 1959, 1961–64 and 1968. Lagutin was born in Moscow. Until 1967 he trained at VSS Trud, then - at VSS Spartak. During the period of failures, that followed the 1964 Olympics, Lagutin was removed from the USSR team roster. Along with his trainer Vladimir Trenin Lagutin managed to find causes of his losses and earned USSR and Olympic Champion titles again in 1968.

More at Wikipedia.

[beechnut79]

(08-30-2022, 07:46 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempt to modernize communist control of the Soviet Union unleashed forces that brought down the superpower, has died, Russian news agencies reported Tuesday.
The Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow said Gorbachev died after "a long and grave illness.'' He was 91.
Leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991, Gorbachev tried to revive the moribund communist state by introducing polices of economic and political openness, known as perestroika and glasnost.
But the reforms quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian control and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation, bringing the Cold War to a conclusion.

When Gorbachev turned 90 last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin -- a critic of Gorbachev's policies -- hailed him in a letter published by the Kremlin as “one of the most outstanding statesmen of modern times who made a considerable impact on the history of our nation and the world.” 


Even though Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War, he was despised by many at home as Russians blamed him for the collapse of the once-fearsome Soviet Union. When he ran for president in 1996, Gorbachev received less than 1% of the vote.
In a 1992 interview with The Associated Press, Gorbachev said he would do it all over again.

“I see myself as a man who started the reforms that were necessary for the country and for Europe and the world,” he said.

Gorbachev presented a more modern, friendlier face to the rest of the world than that of his predecessors atop the Soviet regime, even if he didn't intend to dismantle it.

Ultimately, he was pushed by democratic activists led by Moscow's mayor, Boris Yeltsin, to abolish the Communist Party, eliminating a totalitarian regime that had taken over Eastern Europe and spread communism worldwide.

"Mikhail Gorbachev was arguably the most important world leader since World War II,'' said Paul D'Anieri, a professor of political science at the University of California at Riverside and the author of the 2019 book “Ukraine and Russia."
"The clarity with which he saw the flaws in Soviet communism and the bravery with which he tackled them are not diminished by the fact that his reforms ultimately failed in Russia. Gorbachev almost single-handedly ended the Cold War and in the process brought freedom to over a dozen countries and hundreds of millions of people."
Gorbachev served as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in effect its leader, and in 1990 he became the Soviet Union's first and only president.

Under his rule, the Soviets began withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in 1988, ending a disastrous 10-year military campaign that saw 15,000 Soviet soldiers and about 1 million Afghan civilians killed.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his efforts at arms control in which he and President Ronald Reagan agreed to the first reductions in nuclear stockpiles between the two nations.

A year later, Gorbachev was out of power as the Soviet Union was disbanded and its Eastern European bloc freed, followed by the first free elections in more than 70 years won by his arch-enemy, Yeltsin. Gorbachev's resignation signaled the end of the Cold War period that followed World War II, which was marked by rising tensions between the United States and its allies against the Soviets and their puppet states.

Gorbachev hoped to revive Soviet fortunes, devastated by central planning of the economy and hampered by attempts to keep pace with a military buildup under Reagan, whose pursuit of a space-based anti-nuclear missile system agitated the Soviets. The two leaders agreed to stop making nuclear weapons and eliminate some.
Gorbachev's changes were criticized at home as either too much too fast or not enough, as common goods grew scarce on store shelves, civic unrest grew, particularly among the Baltic and Caucasus states, and national economic problems deepened.

As Moscow weakened, Eastern bloc countries abandoned communism, and some republics long dominated by the Soviets demanded independence. In August 1991, hard-liners in the government launched an abortive coup d'etat. They ordered the Soviet Army to put down demonstrations in Moscow, but the soldiers refused at the urging of Yeltsin.

After the failed takeover, Gorbachev attempted to change the party further, but his power had been overwhelmed by the democratic forces. He resigned from the presidency on Dec. 25, 1991, a day before the Soviet Union dissolved.
Gorbachev's rise to power, after Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982 and the two leaders who briefly followed Brezhnev, roughly coincided with that of Reagan, who was first elected in 1980 with a political appeal based in part on hardline anti-communism. The two met in five summits, the first in Geneva in 1985, where they sat around a fire with only interpreters present in an effort to find common ground and build a relationship, both between themselves and between their countries.

In 1987, they signed a treaty eliminating all nuclear-armed ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 310 to 3,100 miles – the first agreement to reduce nuclear weapons.

Reagan famously invoked Gorbachev's name in his speech in 1987 at the Berlin Wall, when he demanded that the Soviet leader tear down the wall that divided the city between east and west and became emblematic of the Cold War.
"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' Reagan said.

Two years later, in 1989, the wall was opened to permit travel between the two Berlins, and it was gone a year later.
Gorbachev was born Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev on March 2, 1931, to a Russian-Ukrainian peasant family in the village of Privolnoye, Krasnogvardeisky district, Stavropol territory, an agricultural region in the south of the Russian republic.

After leaving power, Gorbachev focused on his Gorbachev Foundation, focusing on change in Russia. In 1999, his wife, Raisa, whom he married in 1953, died after battling leukemia.

From USA Today.

[beechnut79]

(08-30-2022, 07:46 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempt to modernize communist control of the Soviet Union unleashed forces that brought down the superpower, has died, Russian news agencies reported Tuesday.
The Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow said Gorbachev died after "a long and grave illness.'' He was 91.
Leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991, Gorbachev tried to revive the moribund communist state by introducing polices of economic and political openness, known as perestroika and glasnost.
But the reforms quickly overtook him and resulted in the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian control and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation, bringing the Cold War to a conclusion.

When Gorbachev turned 90 last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin -- a critic of Gorbachev's policies -- hailed him in a letter published by the Kremlin as “one of the most outstanding statesmen of modern times who made a considerable impact on the history of our nation and the world.” 


Even though Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War, he was despised by many at home as Russians blamed him for the collapse of the once-fearsome Soviet Union. When he ran for president in 1996, Gorbachev received less than 1% of the vote.
In a 1992 interview with The Associated Press, Gorbachev said he would do it all over again.

“I see myself as a man who started the reforms that were necessary for the country and for Europe and the world,” he said.

Gorbachev presented a more modern, friendlier face to the rest of the world than that of his predecessors atop the Soviet regime, even if he didn't intend to dismantle it.

Ultimately, he was pushed by democratic activists led by Moscow's mayor, Boris Yeltsin, to abolish the Communist Party, eliminating a totalitarian regime that had taken over Eastern Europe and spread communism worldwide.

"Mikhail Gorbachev was arguably the most important world leader since World War II,'' said Paul D'Anieri, a professor of political science at the University of California at Riverside and the author of the 2019 book “Ukraine and Russia."
"The clarity with which he saw the flaws in Soviet communism and the bravery with which he tackled them are not diminished by the fact that his reforms ultimately failed in Russia. Gorbachev almost single-handedly ended the Cold War and in the process brought freedom to over a dozen countries and hundreds of millions of people."
Gorbachev served as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in effect its leader, and in 1990 he became the Soviet Union's first and only president.

Under his rule, the Soviets began withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in 1988, ending a disastrous 10-year military campaign that saw 15,000 Soviet soldiers and about 1 million Afghan civilians killed.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his efforts at arms control in which he and President Ronald Reagan agreed to the first reductions in nuclear stockpiles between the two nations.

A year later, Gorbachev was out of power as the Soviet Union was disbanded and its Eastern European bloc freed, followed by the first free elections in more than 70 years won by his arch-enemy, Yeltsin. Gorbachev's resignation signaled the end of the Cold War period that followed World War II, which was marked by rising tensions between the United States and its allies against the Soviets and their puppet states.

Gorbachev hoped to revive Soviet fortunes, devastated by central planning of the economy and hampered by attempts to keep pace with a military buildup under Reagan, whose pursuit of a space-based anti-nuclear missile system agitated the Soviets. The two leaders agreed to stop making nuclear weapons and eliminate some.
Gorbachev's changes were criticized at home as either too much too fast or not enough, as common goods grew scarce on store shelves, civic unrest grew, particularly among the Baltic and Caucasus states, and national economic problems deepened.

As Moscow weakened, Eastern bloc countries abandoned communism, and some republics long dominated by the Soviets demanded independence. In August 1991, hard-liners in the government launched an abortive coup d'etat. They ordered the Soviet Army to put down demonstrations in Moscow, but the soldiers refused at the urging of Yeltsin.

After the failed takeover, Gorbachev attempted to change the party further, but his power had been overwhelmed by the democratic forces. He resigned from the presidency on Dec. 25, 1991, a day before the Soviet Union dissolved.
Gorbachev's rise to power, after Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982 and the two leaders who briefly followed Brezhnev, roughly coincided with that of Reagan, who was first elected in 1980 with a political appeal based in part on hardline anti-communism. The two met in five summits, the first in Geneva in 1985, where they sat around a fire with only interpreters present in an effort to find common ground and build a relationship, both between themselves and between their countries.

In 1987, they signed a treaty eliminating all nuclear-armed ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 310 to 3,100 miles – the first agreement to reduce nuclear weapons.

Reagan famously invoked Gorbachev's name in his speech in 1987 at the Berlin Wall, when he demanded that the Soviet leader tear down the wall that divided the city between east and west and became emblematic of the Cold War.
"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' Reagan said.

Two years later, in 1989, the wall was opened to permit travel between the two Berlins, and it was gone a year later.
Gorbachev was born Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev on March 2, 1931, to a Russian-Ukrainian peasant family in the village of Privolnoye, Krasnogvardeisky district, Stavropol territory, an agricultural region in the south of the Russian republic.

After leaving power, Gorbachev focused on his Gorbachev Foundation, focusing on change in Russia. In 1999, his wife, Raisa, whom he married in 1953, died after battling leukemia.

From USA Today.

[beechnut79]

Do any of you want to guess what Gorbachev had in common with George Burns?

[sbarrera]

Author Peter Straub (1943-2022)
 


https://locusmag.com/2022/09/peter-straub-1943-2022/

Author Peter Straub, 79, died September 4, 2022 after a long illness. Straub was a celebrated, influential, and bestselling author of literary horror, dark fantasy, and psychological thrillers.

Peter Francis Straub was born March 2, 1943 in Milwaukee WI. He earned a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin in 1965, an MA from Columbia University in 1966, then returned to Wisconsin to teach English at his former prep school for three years. In 1969 he moved to Ireland and began work on a PhD at University College in Dublin, but did not finish. He published two books of poetry in 1972, Ishmael and Open Air, and his first mainstream novel, Marriages, in 1973.

At the suggestion of his agent, Straub decided to give “gothic fiction” a try: first horror novel Julia appeared in 1975 and was later filmed as The Haunting of Julia. If You Could See Me Now (1977) followed, but his breakout novel was the bestselling Ghost Story (1979), later a film. His next supernatural novels were Shadowland (1980) and British Fantasy Award winner Floating Dragon (1983), followed by a few linked works that were mostly non-supernatural: novella Blue Rose (1985), World Fantasy Award winner Koko (1988), Mystery (1990), and Stoker winner The Throat (1993). The Hellfire Club (1997) was a thriller, and Stoker winner Mr. X (1999) was a return to the supernatural. lost boy lost girl (2003) won a Stoker and a World Fantasy Award, and sequel In the Night Room (2004) won a Stoker.

A Dark Matter (2010) won a Stoker, and The Skylark (2010) is “an earlier state” of that novel, described by Straub as “a much looser, sloppier, more wild-eyed version of the book.” Novellas A Special Place (2010) and The Process (Is a Process All Its Own) (2017) concern some of the same characters.

Straub’s collaboration with fellow author Stephen King on The Talisman (1984) landed on the bestseller list and was followed up 17 years later with sequel Black House (2001).

Notable stories include World Fantasy Award-winning novella “The Ghost Village” (1992), Stoker and International Horror Guild Award winner “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff” (1998), and Stoker winner “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” (2011). His short fiction has been collected in Houses Without Doors (1990), Stoker winner Magic Terror (1997), 5 Stories (2007), The Juniper Tree and Other Stories (2010), and retrospective collections Interior Darkness (2016) and The Complete Short Fiction of Peter Straub volumes one and two (2021). Some of his non-fiction was collected in Sides (2006).

He edited HWA anthology Peter Straub’s Ghosts (1995), Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists (2002), the Library of America volume H.P. Lovecraft: Tales (2005), Poe’s Children (2008), and two volumes of American Fantastic Tales for the Library of America; the latter won a World Fantasy Award. His work is discussed in At the Foot of the Story Tree by Bill Sheehan (2000). An occasional actor, he appeared on episodes of soap opera One Life to Live from 2006-2009.

In all, Straub’s books and stories were nominated for a dozen World Fantasy Awards, winning four, and 14 Bram Stoker Awards, with ten wins, among many other award nominations. He was named a World Horror Grandmaster in 1997, won a Stoker award for life achievement in 2006, was named an International Horror Guild living legend in 2008, and received a life achievement World Fantasy Award in 2010. Straub had been on the Locus Science Fiction Foundation board of directors for several decades.

Straub married Susan Bitker in 1966. He is survived by Susan and their two children, Ben and bestselling author Emma Straub. For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and our 2016 interview. A full obituary along with appreciations will appear in the October 2022 issue of Locus.

[pbrower2a]

(09-06-2022, 10:33 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Do any of you want to guess what Gorbachev had in common with George Burns?

My guess is that it has something to do with Ronald Reagan.